Atiku Abubakar is in the tribunals! Why should this be a song? He and
his supporters, after receiving heavy trouncing at the last presidential
election, turned going to a tribunal to a song, a dance; indeed a major
achievement. Dazed by the outcome of the presidential election. Atiku
started the new song of going to the tribunal. He said, over and over
again, that he would go to the tribunal. If he hoped to get a reaction
from Buhari that defeated him, he was terribly shocked that his song of
going to the tribunal was treated with such huge snub as has been known
of Buhari. In fact, it was only some of his party men who were
scandalized by the margin of his loss that advised Atiku not to go to
the tribunal because he was defeated fair and square. But Atiku would
have none of this. He ate and breathed the threat of going to court and
meant the loud but boring repetition of going to the tribunal to be a
morale booster in the face of the humiliation he and his henchmen
received in that election despite their noisy boasts.
We heard when Atiku constituted his legal team as a subset of the
achievement of going to the tribunal. We heard when his legal team went
to institute a case at the tribunal as another subset of Atiku’s weird
achievement. All these and numerous others were celebrated with uncommon
aplomb and publicity by Atiku and his supporters. And then, Atiku went
to court. The tribunal proceedings have been carefully serenaded by
Atiku and his supporters that you might wonder what really is in the
whole process. Atiku suddenly started talking of retrieving his ‘stolen
mandate’ and even as he and his rain-battered supporters knew that Atiku
has no mandate to retrieve, they hung on to this boast as the tribunal
gathered steam and is now rolling in full motion.
Atiku first anchored his claim of a mandate on the weird contents of an
INEC server which is known only to him and his PDP confederates alone.
He claims that a server somewhere belonging to INEC gave him victory; a
queer and horrible claim that has been denied by both INEC and those who
should know. Against the position of INEC, Atiku claims that a certain
INEC server declared him winner of the election and chunked out a bogus
end figure that favoured him with no further back up. Atiku has no
coherent state by state tabulation of results in his server. He has no
local government tabulation, no ward by ward tabulation and no polling
booth by polling booth tabulation of the results he shamelessly hawks as
being from an unknown INEC server that only he and his PDP supporters,
especially his Dubai Strategy members are aware of. Simply speaking,
Atiku invested heavily in bubbles in his strange claim of an INEC server
where results of the 2019 presidential election were transmitted by
God-knows-whom. So embarrassing was that in his so-called INEC server
results, Nigerians only voted him and Buhari and not even a single
Nigerian voted for the many other candidates that contested the
presidential election under several platforms apart from APC and PDP!
Can you beat that?
As his INEC server story refused to fly, Atiku now braced for the
decisive tribunal hearing where he is expected to prove beyond
reasonable doubts, his strange claim of a mandate in an election he was
beaten black and blue. That is the process we are in now and beyond the
watery, leaky, cock-and-bull stories that have so far clothed Atiku’s
queer claims is the opportunity to prove, with indomitable facts, that
he indeed won the election. That is the process we are in now. Atiku has
had an 87-years old Ben Nwabueze, one of his most rabid backers, wheeled
into the court room as his leading lawyer and that is where that drama
ended. Atiku said he will call 400 witnesses to prove his case and the
tribunal has granted him 10 days to do so. By the time of writing this
report, Atiku has just managed to call 36 witnesses and he has just
about 4 days left to call the remaining 384! At the last sitting on
Friday, his lawyers claimed that his witnesses billed to testify that
day, coming from Zamfara were attacked by bandits on the way to Abuja.
They nether provided the identity of those attacked nor where they were
attacked. They threw no further light to this sorry claim but then many
are wondering if Atiku indeed transports his witnesses from far-flung
states to Abuja on the very day they were slated to appear. What are the
chances of a supposed witness slated to testify on a particular day
meeting the tribunal after a journey that was supposed to last for
nearly the whole day? Lie, pure lies and pure evasion tactics! Anyway,
the police has said that no incident of attack by any bandit occurred in
Zamfara nor any person claiming to be Atiku’s witness attacked on the
said day thereby bursting Atiku and his hopeless legal team’s face
saving white lie.
Care to know how Atiku and his witnesses have fared at the tribunal so
far? That one has the capacity of provoking a comedy book. So far, the
performance of Atiku’s witnesses at the tribunal has fed a huge industry
of comedy and parody. What comes from his so-called witnesses is a
cocktail of poorly fabricated stories, forgeries, outlandish lies and
savagery claims that ridicule his case and his state further. One Atiku
witness claimed that Atiku defeated Buhari in Buhari’s Katsina State.
When cross-examined, he couldn’t even produce one sheet of paper to back
up his silly claim. Even then, Atiku’s ‘INEC server’ didn’t make this
claim as it said that Buhari beat Atiku in Katsina but with lesser
margin than in INEC result. This particular claim led one social media
commentator to make a post that the ban on tramadol is not working!
Another claimed that real results were replaced with forged INEC results
and when challenged to produce the real results, he said he didn’t have
any.
One Atiku witness claimed that he transmitted results to an INEC server
and when challenged to give details of the results he allegedly
transmitted, he said he didn’t know the details but was concerned with
transmitting results. One claimed that he transmitted results to INEC
server and when asked the code of the so-called server he transmitted
results to, he said he didn’t know. One claimed that he was seeing a
statement he allegedly made and signed to support Atiku’s claim the very
day he was called to witness for Atiku. Another claimed that on the day
of election, a bomb was detonated at the collation center and he and all
PDP members, agents and supporters ran away and APC members changed the
results. When asked how he knew since he claimed to have ran away, he
said that he hid somewhere and was watching what was happening, although
he didn’t tell us whether the APC members were immune from bomb blast.
One claimed that the results he signed was not the real results, and
when asked why he signed, he said that he just felt like signing.
One of Atiku’s witnesses, in fact his chief witness, Buba Galadima went
there to ridicule himself by claiming to be an APC member working for
PDP. And on and on and on, the parody keeps mounting. One surprising
thing about Atiku’s witnesses is that none has so far passed the
integrity test after being cross-examined. None has tendered half a
proof or fact to back up his specious claims. Like Atiku and those
massing around him, it is obvious that his witnesses were drafted to
tell fairy tales and how Atiku hopes to employ this to become president
should baffle and jar any decent mind. One would have expected Atiku to
come to the tribunal with proof of how he was rigged out in his polling
unit in Adamawa where he was beaten but he did not do that. One would
have expected him to draft his Campaign Director and National Leader of
PDP, Bukola Saraki to witness with resounding proof, how he was rigged
out in his Kwara State where Atiku hopelessly lost but he didn’t do
that. One would have expected Atiku to call his garrulous supporter,
Buba Galadima to witness how he was rigged out in his polling unit where
Atiku was beaten by a whopping 750 votes to his own 25 by Buhari but
this old lickspittle rather came to the tribunal to revel and loaf. One
would have expected Atiku to call Obasanjo, his main godfather in this
election to come and prove to the tribunal how he was rigged out at his
Owu polling unit where Atiku miserably lost to Buhari but he didn’t do
that. Fact is that almost all Atiku’s backbones in all the zones except
South East and South South were beaten down to their wards. Atiku didn’t
call these to witness how Buhari rigged him out starting from their
respective polling units, wards, local governments and states but he
evaded this in his disgraceful claim of having a mandate. He rather went
shopping for cheap witnesses to come to the tribunal to regale the
nation with such silly, empty and baseless claims; none of which has
survived preliminary cross examination.
With the days for him to call his witnesses drawing close, his lawyers,
obviously embarrassed by the jaded parody their case has turned to, have
to fork out that bandit attack story to buy time and bring their case to
an anti-climactic end. But what is obvious from what has happened so far
in Atiku’s much-celebrated tribunal case is that it is a charade; a puff
and a silly tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing. In fact, Festus Keyamo (SAN) was even charitable in describing
Atiku’s election petition as the most useless election petition in
Nigeria’s history. But then, many believe that Atiku knows the
hopelessness of his petition but mobilized all the drama he did around
the case just to maintain a stranglehold on the 2023 presidential
ticket. Time will tell on this too.
Peter ClaverOparah
Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: peterclver2000@yahoo.com